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25 TH ANNIVERSARY

The imaginable future of certification services

There was a news taking my attention recently, which is that a woman in Sydney, Australia landed upon the genius idea of sending a “telepresence robot” to wait in line for her as a digital representative. The robot, which shows the face of shopper Lucy Kelly, features an iPad screen attached to a long pole on wheels that can be controlled remotely. From the news, I realized using high-end technology is not only used by industrial site but also used for individual life. The era that the technology is everywhere already came.We CBs are certifying the organizations which are using cutting-edge technologies.As the body who certify others, we have to be the one of those who should be armed with IT technology and use it. Nevertheless, many of CBs still stick to traditional activities such as phone response, lots of paper work, handing over printed audit report. I believe CB can provide better value to our customers by grafting IT technology onto our services.Let me share my ideas. It might be already implemented or possible IT-grafted certification services.· Improved and faster customer service: you can make proposal service faster by establishing e-quoting system. Customers access your website and as long as they input them in-formation, they can see man days and certification fee automatically. In addition, they can even find from the website whether the date they want to be audited is available or not. It is not a chimerical story. As long as you have a good programmer, you can actualize it right away!· Environment-friendly service: How many papers are you spending for your work? Do you still print the paper and write some notes on it during auditing? If you developed mobile program, you could have brought just a tablet. You can download all the data related to the auditee organization, and write all the findings on the audit report app and upload it. If you don't like typing keyboard, you can also use handwrite on the screen of tablet using surface pro. If you need to take photos as objective evidence, then you can just take photos by camera on tablet and upload the photo on the app. That's it. Through IT solution, you don't need to print a piece of paper.· Creating additional value: When your customer access your website, what will they expect to get? New certification scheme? Maybe. But what If they are existing customers for a long time? aren't they expecting the statistics of results of previous audits? By establishing computer database, you can create additional value for them. you can allocate IDs to customers, and if the customer log in by using the ID, they can see all the previous audit data and be provided statistics of audit results via your website. In addition, they can also find which part of their system is weak· Cost and Time-efficient audit service: If you send a robot like the above-mentioned woman in Australia, instead of an auditor, what will happen? It may sound weird, but in the future a robot will work for you. Have you ever calculated how many days you are losing for travel and how much money your customer is paying for your travel and accommodation? By using robot with camera, microphone, and speaker, you can remote-control the robot at your office and see the customer’s site through the camera and communicate with your auditee at the site through microphone and speaker. You can also show your findings and reports to your customer via monitor equipped in the robot. To do this, what tasks do you have to do? It’s very simple. You can just send and receive the robot by DHL, and your customers can also just pay the delivery fee. I think It will be much cheaper than your flight ticket. In your side, on the other hand, you can save travel time so you can spend your time creating other valuable works or you can audit other customer by using time saved.

For the examples I shared, you may think it is ridiculous for some part or reasonable for some part. just hope my ideas would be a chance to make you have an idea on how to utilize IT technology. The certain thing is the essence never change but the methodology should change depending on the environment.